With time, digital publishers outgrow the web infrastructure they started with at the beginning of their journey. Escalating traffic, leading to performance issues and poor user experience, ultimately discourages visitors from staying, impacting the overall business.
The underlying cause for these difficulties often lies in a combination of factors, such as inexperience of the technical team, underutilization of WordPress’ capabilities, not following coding best practices, and makeshift code patches at the cost of long term health of the website.
In this blog post, we will delve into the common issues encountered by growing digital publishers and how we can help fix them.
Fixing the Legacy Code
Legacy code becomes a common problem for growing publishing teams. Initially, they code themselves or hire an inexperienced team to develop their website. When starting out, subpar code quality and makeshift solutions tend to float under the radar. However, as the traffic grows, the cracks begin to show.
Common problems such as outdated and unoptimized code fail to handle the increasing demands. For example, use of heavy JavaScript libraries can cause the site to slow down. In most cases, we have to rewrite an optimized theme code with limited jQuery usage, minified JavaScript and CSS.
Secure and Performant Hosting
With growing traffic, the right kind of hosting infrastructure becomes crucial – both for user experience and for business reasons. If the hosting infrastructure is incompatible with business needs, issues such as slow response times, security vulnerabilities, prolonged load times, and server management overhead can hit through the roof.
In most cases, we recommend WordPress VIP (WP VIP) hosting. WordPress VIP (WP VIP) is an enterprise-grade architecture designed to run the highest volume, most performance-intensive websites. Moreover, the hosting service is fully managed, freeing up your concerns of managing the server yourself. Our partnership with WP VIP means that we become your single point of contact for development, platform, and deployment.
Our team makes sure that all the media files and article content (posts, pages, and other important metadata) are migrated from your current server to the WordPress VIP server without losing any important data.
Performance Improvements
Performance is generally the reason why most growing publishers think of an upgrade in the first place. We start with an audit of frontend and backend, identifying key areas of improvement. Generally, optimizing cache, backend queries, font, CSS, and JavaScript loading brings most of the improvements.
We have consistently achieved exceptional performance scores in metrics such as Google PageSpeed, Lighthouse, and GTmetrix. Below is an example of the pagespeed scores of one of our clients.
Help With Managing Plugins
Growing teams tend to engage in numerous experiments, resulting in the accumulation of multiple plugins on their websites. Some of these plugins go unused or have duplicate functionality, while others consume excessive space in the database.
We start by auditing current plugins, removing unnecessary ones, and updating the required plugins to the latest versions. If more efficient alternatives exist, we help integrate them seamlessly into your website. This approach ensures the site is performant, secure, and free of bloatware.
Enhanced Security
Outdated plugins, neglected code updates, and unreliable hosting platforms significantly increase the website’s vulnerability to security breaches.
As the business grows, plugging security gaps has to be the top priority. We tackle vulnerabilities with proper code sanitization, update plugins to the latest versions, and replace vulnerable third-party plugins with secure alternatives. As an added measure, we recommend backing up the data on a third-party cloud storage to ensure business continuity in case of any unexpected fallout.
Better Content Management and Editorial Workflow
Growing publishing teams need better editorial workflow and access management to make sure that write-ups are going through the right channels and being approved at every stage. We leverage WordPress’ built-in access management capabilities and implement available or custom solutions available to define the process of approvals.
Earlier, teams could spend a lot of time just figuring out if the content layouts will appear as intended. However, we can help you migrate to Gutenberg blocks, which provides an efficient, reusable structure for creating posts and pages, ensuring consistency. Editors can easily build upon these blocks, reducing complexity and time to publish.
Gutenberg Full-Site Editing (FSE) capability allows Global Style editing, where you can change font type, colors, or size across your entire site with a simple editing change. This makes everything on your website editable by Gutenberg blocks, not only the post content.
We can also develop custom Gutenberg blocks that allow you to showcase various types of content, including articles, affiliate products, reviews, and table of contents.
Along with this, we can also migrate data from Advance Custom Fields (ACF) to these blocks, if required.
Additional Functionalities – Ads, Push Notifications, and Progressive Web App (PWA)
Growing publishing teams have diverse needs – to either increase engagement with their readers or for better revenue generation.
Implementing push notifications can significantly enhance engagement with your subscribed users. Similarly, we have seen that Progressive Web Apps (PWA) ensure that your content reaches a wide audience across various devices with a single codebase. Not only does it provide an exceptional offline user experience, but it also makes the deployment and update process more cost-effective.
Typically, ads are a major driver of revenue for most publishers. We understand that your marketing team should not depend on developers to place and manage ads. We implement solutions so that managing ad placements – including configuring slots, sizes, server connections and managing ad inventory can be managed by non-technical teams without any need for code.
Migrate With rtCamp
The last thing a growing publishing team needs is to lose readers because of technical issues. Having worked with publishers of all sizes, from Al Jazeera and Indian Express to Greater Kashmir and Vanguard News, we understand the pain points and business needs of growing publishers.
With our WordPress migration recipe perfected through years, growing publishing teams can improve website performance, enhance user engagement, remove server management burden, manage ads, and dedicate full attention to growing your business.
If you think it’s time to migrate to WordPress or revamp your website, checkout our Migration Services.
Links: Custom patterns & blocks with a performant website for Summer Works | 49% more leads with UI/UX refresh & VIP migration for Ready Logistics
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